In his New Republic article, “How Tax Reform Represents Obama’s Greatest Shot at Hope and Change,” Mark Schmitt challenges Dems to seize the initiative “to move the whole country in the direction of greater fairness, growth, and financial stability.”

…Nothing about tax reform is going to be any easier than the debt-limit deal itself. Still, if a budget deal commits Congress to do something, the goal of tax reform can be much more than just moving the long-term revenue line a little closer to the spending line. Because the tax code sets some of the basic parameters of our economic structure, it can also be an opportunity to move the whole country in the direction of greater fairness, growth, and financial stability.
…While far from the only cause of structural inequality, the tax code is a big part of it, and tax reform can change it. The first step is to end the special treatment of capital gains and dividend income–not just because the wealthy get more of their income in that form, but because of the incentives it has created to increase inequality and risk. That’s a reform that would both clean up the code and give us more of what we want more of.
But imagine a tax code that tried to undo its own damage. When so much inequality is created within single companies, why not reward companies that are narrowing the gap and tax companies that widen it? The average CEO now takes home 350 times the pay of the average worker, a difference that’s more than tripled since 1990, and is unknown in any other country. Leo Hindery, a former telecommunications executive, has proposed a tax penalty for companies where executive compensation exceeds a certain level; another proposal, put forward by investor Steve Silberstein, would adjust the corporate tax rate based on the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker. A company with a ratio at the 1980 level of 50:1 would pay tax at the current rate of 35 percent, with the rate rising for companies with a higher ratio and lower for those with a narrower pay gap.

Schmitt argues that merely allowing the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250K would not raise enough revenue to “make a dent in the conditions of those in the bottom 60 percent who have gained almost nothing over the last 30 years.” He likens it to “dipping into great fortunes with a teaspoon, and sprinkling it over the rest of the country” and, besides, the revenue raised this way in the President’s proposal is “earmarked for deficit reduction.”
He also cites the tax code incentives for spiking executive pay upward as a major systemic injustice that must be corrected in any plan for meaningful reform, and adds that an historic transformation toward greater fairness is now a real possibility. “Taxation provides the basic structure of incentives in our economy, and the Bush and Reagan tax changes got them wrong,” explains Schmitt. “If the budget deal does lead to tax reform, it’s a welcome opportunity to get them right this time. ”

Attention Democratic campaign workers: Keith Pickering has a don’t-miss post up at Daily Kos “WOW! Simple wording change dramatically increases voter turnout.” It’s all about how pre-election surveys can make a significant difference in GOTV. Pickering quotes from a PHYSorg.com article by Bob Yirka about a new study conducted by Stanford University social psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues, Gregory M. Walton, Todd Rogers, and Carol S. Dweck:

Bryan and his team first sent out surveys to just 38 people prior to the 2008 presidential election. Half the group got a survey asking if it was important to vote, the other half got surveys asking if it was important to be a voter. 87.5 [percent] responded yes to the second question while only 55.6 [percent] did so with the first.
Feeling he was on to something, Bryan then set his sights higher, for his next experiment, he and his team sent surveys to 133 registered voters in California one day before the 2008 election. Afterwards, using voting records, he was able to ascertain that 82% of those who got the “vote” question actually voted, while 96% of the “voter” group did [actually vote].

Bryan and his colleagues noted very similar results in a New Jersey test, which found a 90 percent turnout for the ‘voter’ group vs. 79 percent for the ‘vote’ group, “the largest ever measured effect on voter turnout.”
The authors attribute the increased turnout to leveraging the power of ‘personal identity’ as a motivating force vs. asking about behavior in the abstract — an “are you a good citizen?” subtext.
Pickering provides a handy never-say-this/always-say-this-instead chart for pre-election GOTV surveys, which campaign workers should study (e.g.: Say “Are you going to be a voter on Tuesday?” instead of “Are you going to vote on Tuesday?”)
It could make a difference in close elections. As Pickering concludes, “A 10% to 15% increase in turnout for a tiny word change? Miracles don’t come any cheaper. ”

Alright, Dems, don’t get too excited or overconfident. But state Sen. Dave Hansen’s victory in Wisconsin yesterday is a very good sign. Not only did Hansen get 66 percent of the vote to thwart a GOP-led effort to recall him in retaliation for Hansen’s fleeing the state to try and prevent Governor Walker’s union-bashing. But he did it in a fairly conservative district the GOP considered a prime target, and despite a healthy Republican turnout. A couple of graphs from Steve Contorno’s report in the Appleton Post-Crescent:

Hansen’s victory over a controversial candidate wasn’t a shocker. VanderLeest’s legal and financial troubles became the focus of his campaign, dragging down his bid even after he vowed not to discuss them anymore.
But the margin of victory and the turnout by voters were a first-round demonstration of the Democratic Party’s ground game going into August, when six Republicans and two more Democrats face recall elections with control of state government hanging in the balance….If Democrats can net three seats, they will win back the Senate and provide a check to Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s virtually unchallenged agenda….

Contorno cautions, however,

Hansen’s victory may not be indicative of the rest of Wisconsin, where the eight remaining recall races are the first opportunity for voters to take decisive action for or against the direction Walker and Republicans have taken the state since January. That test will come Aug. 9 when six GOP senators face Democratic challengers followed by the Aug. 16 recall elections of Sens. Jim Holperin, D-Conover, and Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie.

The outcome of these recall elections could have a significant impact on the future of both the labor movement and the Democratic Party. Those who want to help are directed to ActBlue’s web pages for the Wisconsin recall.

If you had the feeling that there is way too much congressional energy and media coverage being lavished on the debt ceiling negotiations, you are not alone. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports in today’s edition of his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’

For most Americans the most important issues are still the economy and jobs. In a late June CBS/New York Times poll, 53 percent said the economy/jobs was the most important problem facing the country today, compared to just 7 percent who said the deficit/debt was most important.
What’s more, 62 percent thought reducing unemployment was more important than reducing the deficit in a just-released Quinnipiac University poll, compared to just 32 percent who thought reducing the deficit was more important.

As Teixeira concludes, “Wake up, policymakers! We’ve got 9.2 percent unemployment, and the public isn’t interested in endless disputes about how much and how fast to cut the deficit. They’re interested in jobs.”

It’s beginning to look like GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor may be the congressional Democrats’ secret weapon in the battle for public support in the debt ceiling talks. In a CBS News Poll conducted July 15-17, 71 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the handling of the debt ceiling negotiations by Republicans in congress, with only 21 percent saying they approved of the Republicans role. Slightly more than half of Republicans, 51 percent, said they disapproved of how members of their party in congress are negotiating.
Not that the figures favoring Democratic members of congress were all that great, with 58 percent expressing their disapproval of Democrats in the debt ceiling negotiations, and 31 percent approving. But most Dems are no doubt OK with a 13 point edge over the GOP House members in the disapproval figures.
President Obama did significantly better in the poll, with 43 percent approving of his leadership in the debt ceiling negotiations, and 48 percent disapproving. It can be argued that there are no big winners here. But it’s clear enough which party is the biggest loser.

A new Quinnipiac University poll conducted July 5-11, affirms the findings of recent polls — that the public will blame Republicans if the debt ceiling not negotiated in time to prevent an economic catastrophe. As Jordan Howard explains the findings in his HuffPo report:

A plurality of registered voters said congressional Republicans are to blame in the event the debt ceiling is not raised in a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University from July 5-11.
When asked to whom they would assign responsibility should the limit not be raised, 48 percent of respondents chose the congressional Republicans; 34 percent said they would blame the Obama administration.
These results echo a Pew Research Center poll conducted from June 16-19 which asked the same question as the Quinnipiac poll. According to that survey, 42 percent of respondents said they would blame Republicans in Congress if the debt ceiling were not raised; 33 percent chose the Obama Administration.

Among the other findings of the Quinnipiac poll:

The country is in a recession, 71 percent of American voters say, but by 54 – 27 percent they blame former President George W. Bush more than President Obama.
The president gets a 47 – 46 percent job approval rating, unchanged from the June 9 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University. That tops a 64 – 28 percent disapproval for Democrats in Congress and a 65 – 26 percent disapproval for Republicans.
…Voters say 67 – 25 percent that an agreement to raise the debt ceiling should include tax hikes for the wealthy and corporations, not just spending cuts.
…By a 62 – 32 percent margin, American voters say it’s more important to reduce unemployment than to reduce the federal budget deficit. But they say 49 – 43 percent it’s more important to reduce unemployment than to reduce government spending.

Interestingly, Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling institute, notes that “The key voting bloc, independents, say 49 – 24 percent that Bush is more responsible for the economy than Obama.” Independents are not much of a “voting bloc,” as Alan Abramowitz recently explained. But the 2-1 gap certainly suggests that even Republican ‘leaners’ are clear about who created the current economic decline.
Howard quotes GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “If we go into default he [Obama] will say Republicans are making the economy worse…and all of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy.”
They way things are going for Republicans, “co-ownership” sounds like wishful thinking.

Yes, it’s too early to make informed predictions about which party will have control of the House of Representatives after the 2012 elections. And much depends of the quality of individual candidates, many of whom are not yet selected. But knowing where Dems stand in polls and redistricting can be useful in formulating strategy.
Toward that end, Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the U.Va. Center for Politics, has an interesting post, “Channeling Truman? The Race for the House” up at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Kondik weighs current redistricting snapshots and polls, and has this to say about Dem House prospects:

Democrats are focusing on the 61 districts that Obama carried in 2008 that are now represented by Republicans in the House (again, this is under old maps); other than two in Texas and one each in Nebraska and Kansas, all of these Obama/Republican districts are in states Obama carried. Generally, these seats are clustered around Chicago and across the Upper Midwest; between Philadelphia and Rochester; and across Florida and Southern California. Geographically, these are the places where Democrats need to make their move.

But he warns that “History is not in the Democrats’ favor: In 16 post-World War II presidential elections, the party of the winning presidential party has picked up an average of only about 13 House seats,” the grand exception being 1948, when Dems picked up “an eye-popping 76 House seats, thus reclaiming the House”.
Can it happen again? Kondik says

Democrats need less than a third — 24 — of the seats Truman’s Democrats won in 1948 to recapture the House, but it is still a very tall task.
…Can they do it? Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would effectively change Medicare into a voucher system, gives Democrats a potentially potent weapon, especially among seniors, who are the most committed voters. And an economic recovery, combined with a weak GOP presidential candidate, could sweep Obama back into office with, if not Truman-like coattails, enough strength to move the House back into the Democratic column. Such a combination of sunny factors for the Democrats is an unlikely forecast, but in this era of wild weather, it is at least possible.

Kondik believes that Republicans are on track for a very small net gain in House seats as a result of redistricting, but warns that could be offset by Democratic redistricting success in Illinois and California. Another wild card that may help Dems, says Kondik, is Democratic control of the DOJ, which will hopefully challenge the GOP’s dilution of Black voting strength in redistricting. Kondik concludes,

So at this very early stage, the Crystal Ball would place a decent-sized bet on the Republicans to retain the lower chamber of Congress. Yet out of an abundance of caution — instilled by history’s sometimes erratic, fickle gyrations — we are not yet ready to write off Democratic chances in the House completely. There are too many land mines on the long and winding road to November 2012 for both parties to be absolutely sure of anything 481 days before America votes.

It remains unclear whether the theatrics of Republican House members in recent weeks will hurt their party in the 2012 House elections. Of course, economic recovery over the next 15 months remains the pivotal factor for Democrats. But it’s clear Dems can also benefit by vigorous enforcement of the Voting Rights Act with respect to redistricting, calling the GOP out on their proposals to weaken Medicare and Social Security and highlighting the Republicans’ failure to come up with any job-creating proposals other than tax cuts.

According to a just-released Gallup Poll conducted 7/7-10, an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to address the deficit, contrary to the Republicans refusal to consider any tax hikes whatsoever.
As Nate Silver explains it in his Five Thirty Eight blog:

Few Americans, however, take the view that spending cuts alone should be made in a deal, with no tax increases at all. In fact, only 26 percent of the Republican voters surveyed in Gallup’s poll took that position, along with 20 percent of voters overall.
We can also use the Gallup poll to tease out what mix of tax increases and spending cuts the public would like to see in a deal. Assume that the people who told Gallup that they wanted “mostly” cuts would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio of spending reductions to tax increases, and that those who said they wanted mostly tax increases would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio in the opposite direction. (The other choices that Gallup provided in the poll — an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts or a deal that consisted entirely of one or the other — are straightforward to interpret.)
The average Republican voter, based on this data, wants a mix of 26 percent tax increases to 74 percent spending cuts. The average independent voter prefers a 34-to-66 mix, while the average Democratic voter wants a 46-to-54 mix…

But the no-tax position of the House Republicans is absurdly out of step, not only with the public, but with Republican voters in particular. As Silver notes,

Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent — a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.

Noting the the House Republicans seem wedded to their no-tax pledge, regardless of public opinion, Silver concludes of the debt ceiling negotiations, “…Democrats have little reason to capitulate either: they are on the right side of public opinion.”

Alan I. Abramowitz takes the punditry to task once again, for their refusal to acknowledge the truth about the category termed “independent voters.” From Abramowitz’s latest post at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

There they go again. The presidential campaign season is barely under way but already pundits and pollsters are making misleading claims about independent voters and the role they play in presidential elections. Here are some of the things you’ve probably read or heard in recent weeks:
Independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate.
Independent voters are up for grabs in 2012.
Whichever party wins a majority of the independent vote will almost certainly win the presidency.
These beliefs about the crucial role of independent voters in presidential elections have become the conventional wisdom among the Washington commentariat, reinforced by groups like “No Labels” and “Third Way” that try to promote centrist solutions to the nation’s problems. Recently, the Pew Research Center provided additional support for this theory with a report claiming that independents constitute a rapidly growing and diverse group of voters who swing dramatically back and forth from election to election.

It’s mostly baloney, Abramowitz argues:

…The large majority of independents are independents in name only…the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate.

As for the myth that Independents are the big, bad pivotal constituency of the American electorate, Abramowitz adds, that “…In all three closely contested presidential elections since 1972, the candidate backed by most independent voters lost.”:

In 1976, most independents voted for Gerald Ford but Jimmy Carter won the overall popular vote. In 2000, most independents voted for George W. Bush but Al Gore won the overall popular vote (despite losing the Electoral College). And in 2004 most independents voted for John Kerry but George W. Bush won the overall popular vote.

Abramowitz explains how the ‘Independents’ category is grossly inflated by the inclusion of ‘leaners’:

Let’s start with the claim that independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate. That’s true only if you lump all independents together including those who don’t vote and those who lean toward a party. In 2008, according to the American National Election Study, independents made up 40% of eligible voters but only 33% of those who actually voted. Moreover, of that 33%, only 7% were true independents with no party preference. The other 26% were leaners.
And what about those independent leaners? Fully 87% of them voted for the candidate of the party they leaned toward: 91% of independent Democrats voted for Barack Obama while 82% of independent Republicans voted for John McCain. That 87% rate of loyalty was identical to the 87% loyalty rate of weak party identifiers and exceeded only by the 96% loyalty rate of strong party identifiers.
It’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of independent leaners voted for their party’s presidential candidate in 2008. The evidence from the 2008 ANES…shows that independent Democrats and Republicans held very different views on major issues — views that were very similar to those of their fellow partisans. Independent Democrats were more liberal than weak Democrats and about as liberal as strong Democrats while independent Republicans were less conservative than strong Republicans but just as conservative as weak Republicans.
These results suggest that the high level of support given by independent leaners to their own party’s presidential candidate was not due simply to a short-term preference for that candidate over his opponent but instead reflected longer-term ideological and policy preferences. Based on this evidence, independent leaners are unlikely to be “up for grabs” in 2012. Regardless of who wins the Republican presidential nomination, we can expect the overwhelming majority of independent leaners, like the overwhelming majority of strong and weak identifiers, to remain loyal to their party because they strongly prefer their party’s policies to the opposing party’s policies.

Abramowitz concludes: “In a close election, a candidate with an energized and unified party base can sometimes overcome a deficit among independent voters. That doesn’t mean the candidates should ignore independents, but it does mean that unifying and energizing their own party’s base is just as important as appealing to the independents.”

Republicans still want to slash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits to reduce the debt, but the latest public opinion data indicates they will be facing overwhelming public opposition in doing so. TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in this week’s ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…A just-released Pew poll documents the extent of public opposition. The poll asked respondents what is more important, reducing the budget deficit or keeping Medicare and Social Security benefits as they are. By an overwhelming 60-32 margin the public prefers to keep Medicare and Social Security as they are.

The same opposition applies to GOP proposals to make people pay more for their Medicare benefits:

The public is also opposed to increasing the health care costs Medicare recipients are responsible for. By 61-31, the public believes people on Medicare are already paying enough of their health care costs.

Nor is there much public support for reducing medical benefits for low-income Americans:

…By 58-37, they say that low-income people should not have their benefits taken away, rather than agreeing that states should be able to cut back on Medicaid eligibility to deal with budget problems.

All of the media hype about debt reduction notwithstanding, the public remains unconvinced that “slashing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has to be part of any such deal,” says Teixeira. “Conservatives, if they have any sense, will back off on this one.”